Born in London, 3d February 1816, the son of an artillery captain, and was educated for the army at Beverley, Tours, and Edinburgh Academy and University. Resolving, however, to take orders, he studied at Brasenose, Oxford, 1837–40, and for nearly a year held a curacy at Winchester. His health broke down; but a walking tour on the Continent cured it, and at Geneva he married. In 1842 he became the curate of Christ Church, Cheltenham. His faith in Evangelicalism was shaken by the intolerance of its partisans. After holding for a time the curacy in Oxford, in 1847 he became incumbent of Trinity Chapel, Brighton, where his earnestness, originality, and wide sympathy arrested public attention. But the comprehensiveness of his Christian ideal exposed him to not a little odium—he was suspected alike by Evangelicals and High Churchmen. During his last years he suffered from disease of the brain. He resigned in June 1853 because his vicar had refused to confirm his nomination of a curate, and died 15th August 1853. He published but one sermon—the four series (1855, 1857, 1859–63) so well known over the English-speaking world are really recollections, sometimes dictated and sometimes written out. Yet another volume, “The Human Race, &c.,” was issued in 1880. Other works are “Expository Lectures on St. Paul’s Epistles to the Corinthians” (1859), “Lectures and Addresses” (1858), “An Analysis of ‘In Memoriam’” (1862), and “Notes on Genesis” (1877). See his “Life and Letters,” by the Rev. Stopford A. Brooke (1865).

Personal

  So lived and so died, leaving behind him a great legacy of thought, a noble gentleman, a Christian minister. To the tenderness of a true woman he joined the strong will and the undaunted courage of a true man. With an intellect at home in all the intricacies of modern thought, he combined the simple spirit of a faithful follower of Christ. To daring speculation he united severe and practical labour among men. Living above the world, he did his work in the world. Ardently pursuing after liberty of thought he never forgot the wise reticence of English conservatism. He preserved, amid a fashionable town, the old virtues of chivalry. In a very lonely and much-tried life he was never false or fearful. Dowered with great gifts of intellect, was always humble; dowered with those gifts of the heart which are peculiarly perilous to their possessor, he never became their slave. He lived troubled on every side, yet not distressed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed; always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in his body. He died, giving up his spirit with his last words, in faith and resignation to his Father. He lies in a hollow of the Downs he loved so well. The sound of the waves may be heard there in the distance; and standing by his grave, it seems a fair and fitting requiem; for if the inquietude of the sea was the image of his outward life, its central calm is the image of his deep peace of activity in God.

  We cannot think, and few besides his own friends will think, that he had laid his hand with so sure an accuracy and with so much promise upon the clue which others had lost or bungled over. But there is much to learn in his thoughts and words, and there is not less to learn from his life. It is the life of a man who did not spare himself in fulfilling what he received as his task, who sacrificed much in order to speak his message, as he thought, more worthily and to do his office more effectually, and whose career touches us the more from the shadow of suffering and early death that hangs over its aspirations and activity.

  The incidents in Robertson’s life are few and unimportant; its dramatic interest lies in the inward conflict, which was incessantly renewed. However keenly wounded in his deepest affections, he made no sign of suffering; his soul was too proud, too noble to betray its secret anguish. His sermons give scarcely any indication of the conflicts within; few could guess how deeply agitated was the soul that could express itself with such quiet strength. Yet every word was perfectly sincere; the calmness was no mere mask, it was a manly self-conquest. He was like the young Spartan who kept a quiet face while the wild beast was gnawing at his vitals, and would have deemed it dishonour to betray his agony. The publication of Robertson’s life was, therefore, a revelation to the readers of his sermons. It showed how much every sermon had cost him.

  I have been greatly impressed by the extraordinary influence which Robertson almost unconsciously exercised upon those who were brought within the range of his personal influence. I know many persons who have been brought into close personal relationship with celebrated men. But I have known no case in which the influence has been more profound and lasting than in the case of Robertson. His, indeed, was one of the most rare and radiant natures that, with all its errors and imperfections, has ever adorned humanity. He has left hardly anything which he distinctly designed for publication, but the letters, lectures, and sermons which he threw off, and which have been mainly preserved through the devotion of his friends, make up some eight volumes, which increasingly invite and repay analysis and criticism. But the man himself is infinitely greater than his utterances, and affords a study of the utmost pathos and interest.

  Robertson, whose character, in all points that were comprehended within the region of morality, was not only stainless but exalted, nevertheless suffered from some minor defects disastrous in his public position—fiery vehemence, exaggerated sensitiveness, and an entire lack of humour. He went into fits of passion over his detractors’ iniquity without any countervailing perception of their absurdity, and every petty annoyance still further impaired the nervous energy which, apart from all merely external causes, was continually preying upon itself.

  In the portrait, a water-colour drawing executed by Basebé in 1853,… even casual students of physiognomy may read the soul and genius of Robertson. It is a superbly intellectual brow and forehead. The lines of close and constant thought are scored in every lineament of the face. But the expression is not merely that of a thinker: it is also that of a born leader of men, of one fitted equally for the task whether the leadership were moral or physical, an attack upon a redoubt, bristling with cannon and steel, or a resistance to the forces of social and religious corruption, banded in a corrupt age against gravity and truth. The scorn of the mean, of the false, of the low, lighting up the whole countenance, is that which so often illuminated in pulpit, on platform, and in private talk, the features of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley. The serenity of soul; betokened by the quiet eye, recalls in his happiest moments the tranquility that Jowett always seemed to have at his command.

General

  The publication of Mr. Robertson’s “Letters” was considered to be of great importance. They seemed to add a personal interest to his “Sermons,” to explain fully his mode of thought, to indicate the source of progress of many of his views, and to supplement his general teaching. They are full of tender human thought, of subtle and delicate feeling, and of much tried and suggestive experience. They possess also, in common with his “Sermons,” a peculiar literary interest. This interest lies not so much in the originality of their ideas as in the mode in which these ideas are represented. The choice of words in them is remarkable. There is sometimes a happy indefiniteness which belongs to and which suggests the infinite nature of the things discussed. A spirit pervades them which influences unconsciously their reader, and renders him receptive of their truths, by inducing in him a kindred tone of heart. Even Robertson’s slight sketches of an idea, traced perhaps in a single sentence, contain the materials for a finished composition. If he is not a Creator he is eminently a lucid Interpreter of thought. It is in this power of apt, logical, and striking expression that the chief literary interest of his writings consists.

  I had once seen him, heard him preach, but he did not please me, and I did him no justice. Now I shall read his sermons which, from the impression I took, I had abstained from reading, and, very likely, I shall make him the subject of a lecture at Oxford.

  Robertson’s “Sermons” have the merit of being very thoughtful and suggestive, but appear to me, both as to form and substance, to have been given to the world too much in the state of raw material. Perhaps you see more of the process of thought, which is no doubt interesting, but you miss the finished results.

  Everything with him was done with a view to edifying. Wherever he quarried he was in search of spiritual ideas. Literature, science, history, art, furnished him material for sermons. He found moral significance in everything. The dryest text was juicy to him. He turned stones into bread. He was a brave man, too; he faced doubt; he did justice to skepticism and unbelief and denial; he dealt honestly with Romanist and with atheist, with Greek and Jew, as well as he could; and the ground of this honest dealing was his faith that truth was identical with itself under all the varieties of its symbolism. He poured the old wine into the new bottles and the new wine into the old bottles, in perfect confidence that no bottle would burst under the pressure of fermentation, and that no wine would be spilled in the hasty decanting from one vessel into another. He can find a great truth anywhere, and he can find an antique vase for every truth he discovers…. The reader is fascinated by the ingenuity, the brilliancy, the beauty, the swift legerdemain which shuffles meanings so deftly in and out; the boldness, the candor, the keenness, the charity, the seeming insight, are charming; but before long comes a sense of illusion and mystification; thoughtfulness pauses to ask if all this can be true; if the candor is quite candid or the fairness quite fair. The critical mind asks if there are then no distinctions; if there is not some trick about either the bottles or the wine; if everything is true, and everything is new, and everything is old, and where we are to stop in the process of legitimizing old credences and myths and superstition. Why should we not all be Romanists at once? Nay, for the matter of that, why should we not all be pagans? The glamour becomes so painfully bewildering to some persons that they lay down the volume in a sort of despair.

  Men there are with such fullness of the higher life in their brains that they overflow procreatively upon their fellows. Of this chosen few was Robertson, one of those deep, pure, abundant human springs that, at far intervals along our track, gush up strong and clear, where all may drink and be slaked, the laborer and the lord, the scholar and the artisan, man and woman. The depth and beauty and limpidity and, I will add, the practicality, of Robertson’s teaching all come from its spirituality. Few are as intelligent as he; and so spiritually-minded I know, in our generation, of no man who has been in the public eye. He was a many-sided man, morally and intellectually. Had he not been what he became,—a light such as shone from no other pulpit within the British realm,—he might have made himself an influential parliamentary orator, or a far-eyed military leader, foremost in the advance, or a brilliant scientific expounder.

  The influence of Robertson increases every day; he stands acknowledged as one of the greatest minds of the age, and as the happy exponent of its best aspirations. His theology is not exempt from the imperfections of a transition period. It should rather be regarded as representing in its noblest phase an era of deep religious agitation.

  The name of Frederick Robertson is on many accounts remarkable. There is probably no one of our time whose writings have had such an extended influence after his death, and who yet was during his lifetime so little known except to the immediate circle to whom he ministered. His extraordinary merits as a preacher were acknowledged in that limited range, but beyond this, although from time to time his fame reached the outer world, yet his manner, his voice, his appearance, were entirely unknown…. How remarkable is the contrast of this obscurity with his widespread popularity in after years! It is not too much to say that he has become, beyond question, the greatest preacher of the nineteenth century, the most widely admired, and with the most powerful reasons for this wide-spread judgment.

  It was in all the nobler qualities of thought, insight, and feeling that he excelled; as it is these qualities that still live in his sermons and have made them such a marvellous power. He was characteristically a Thinker in the Pulpit. He went straight to the heart of every subject that he touched, and with a rare combination of imaginative and dialectic power brought out all its meaning. He felt a truth before he expressed it; but when once he felt it, and by patient study had made it its [his] own, he wrought it with the most admirable logic—a logic closely linked, yet living in every link—into the minds of his hearers. This live glowing concatenated sequence of thought is seen in all his greater sermons. It could only have been forged in a brain stirred to its depths—on fire with the ideas which possessed him for the time—yet never mastered by, always mastering, his subject. This impress of creative force as he proceeded in his sermons gives them their wonderful perfection of form amidst all their hurrying energy. They are many of them great as literary compositions, with a living movement rare even in the higher literature. The truth is, they were literally the creation of moments of inspired utterance. We cannot imagine them written in cold blood. Their organization shows a heated yet controlled enthusiasm.

  Robertson was not merely fervent with the impassioned energy of youth (he died at thirty-seven) and eloquent with the earnestness of deep conviction, but he was the most quickening and suggestive of thinkers. He denied creeds and formulas only to affirm more grandly the truths at their heart.

  Robertson had a vein of reflective sentiment, an almost feminine softness, sadness, and the wistful reflectiveness about him, which had a sympathetic attraction beyond that of any of his contemporaries.

  Open the sermons of Robertson where you will, take him on any subject, you will find him teaching plain, simple, common sense. He is never hampered by tradition, yet never violent. He is never daring you to follow him. He simply unfolds the truth and makes it luminous with the choicest words. He treats old faiths with the utmost respect. He brings out what truths there are in them, and with a magic touch transforms them into life and beauty. With him the atonement loses its harsh and vindictive character, the doctrine of the trinity becomes natural and plausible, prophecy is changed from petty prediction to the grandest statement of universal truths, regeneration becomes a plain necessity to ever true nature, and Christ is the fulfillment of the longing desire of imperfect man.

  Robertson’s preaching is not very easy to judge, because the published sermons are admittedly not what was actually delivered, but after-reminiscences or summaries, and the judgment is not rendered easier by the injudicious and gushing laudation of which he has been made the subject. He certainly possessed a happy gift of phrase now and then, and remarkable earnestness.

  Owes his position entirely to the celebrated sermons which he preached at Brighton during the last six years of his life. They are not great in scholarship, nor even in eloquence, but they exhibit a character of many-sided attractiveness which was the real secret of Robertson’s power.